Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Charlton Heston Dies at 84

Charlton Heston passed away tonight at his home in Beverly Hills. Cause of death as not yet been released.

MSNBC obit

I just watched the HD version of PotA last night. Need to look around for a copy of the Omega Man now.

R.I.P.

Wow, on the list of people you think of as too tough to die he was way up there.

A true Hollywood legend. I'd heard a while ago that he had come down with Alzheimer's.

He'll be missed.

In recent years Heston's political views, which were quite different from mine, have received more attention than his acting career.

I was talking about him with some friends a few weeks ago. We agreed that even though we didn't like a lot of what he said in real life, we enjoyed his films--and we (all three of us in the conversation are gay men) agreed that he was gorgeous!

RIP

So i guess this means we can now try to pry that gun from his cold dead hands now?? well if he just died last night i guess his hands aren't cold yet?
but his politics aside he was truly a great actor, he led a great life and will truly be remembered.

I wonder if he's been turned into Soylent Green yet?

sorry. couldn't resist.

I always wanted to do a revamp, and needed him for the opening scene. oh, well. too late now.

There was always talk of a Soylent Green remake but, like with I Am Legend (which Omega Man was based on) it stalled after having Arnold attached to it in the 90's. As for having Heston in the opening, I think it would have been interesting to see him in the role of Sol, Edward G. Robinson in the original.

In the 1970s, my then-hippie uncle was (briefly) a garbage collector for Wilmette, Illinois, a north-shore suburb of Chicago. Heston's mother's house was on his route. On one occasion, as my uncle's truck was starting to pull away from her house, Heston himself came running out, wearing a flowing, windswept bathrobe, to take out the garbage, which led to all sorts of family jokes about Moses bringing the garbage down from Mt. Sinai, or "get your hands on this garbage you damn, dirty hippie!"

Also, it's easy to demonize Heston for his reactionary politics in the 1980s and 1990s, "cold, dead hands," etc. However, there's this striking image as a counterpoint:



Heston, Brando and James Baldwin, united in common cause at the 1963 March on Washington, the occasion of King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

I think more than anything Heston was a proponent of a "muscular" defense of individual liberty. His later association with Reagan and the NRA was perhaps the result of his feeling that the "left" of the 1970s and 1980s was not sufficiently supportive of that liberty. That's a real debate as to whether that was the case, but it is a historical fact that a lot of pro-liberty white guys of that generation felt alienated from the progressive movement, beginning in the late 1960s--hence Ronald Reagan's personal journey and the "Reagan Democrat" voting bloc. Regardless, Heston's past shows that people aren't easily reduced to either/or stereotypes.

http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20080406.html

Here's what I posted the other day at another message board...


Over the years Heston became one of my favorite actors, even though there's probably a pile of his movies I've still never seen. But in recent years I began to notice a disturbing trend in his career-- namely, a lot of characters he played tended to get KILLED by the end of the stories! Even in MIDWAY, where he played pretty much the ONLY character who was not based on an actual historical figure, he wound up being one of the few central characters to get killed at the end (as if someone felt they just "had" to kill SOMEBODY and he gleefully volunteered).

I've also, thanks to a documentary about PLANET OF THE APES, really begun to hold a grudge against him. Nobody connected with that film-- EXCEPT the money-hungry producers, wanted a sequel, and those cheap bastards who'd refused to give the film a decent budget in the first place INSISTED on one. Then, they gave it HALF the budget of the 1st film, despite its nearly single-handedly saving their studio from bankruptcy that year! At every point in its creation, the changes in the script kept making it WORSE, not better, and while Heston at first wanted nothing to do with it, he later agreed to be involved, but only with the suggestion that they KILL him at the end! And then, while making the film, he came up with another suggestion-- BLOWING UP the whole planet, just to make SURE they couldn't make another one. (We all see how well THAT idea worked!) Having recently read what the proposed ending of the film might have been BEFORE his suggestions, I can only say he's personally responsible for MURDERING what could have been at least a halfway-decent film. (I now rank him together with Sigourney Weaver as people who SHOULD have held out for better scripts, instead of letting themselves get sucked into disasters-in-the-making and then making them EVEN WORSE with their own ideas-- think ALIEN 3.)

And while I'm at it... I've considered THE TEN COMMANDMENTS one of the most magnificent films ever made, since seeing it on a theatrical reissue in the early 70's. But having been brought up Catholic, I always remember thinking in the theatre, "There's something WRONG with this version of the story." It was the Hollywoodization of it-- that shameless SOAP-OPERA stuff that wasn't "in the book", and which actually serves to undermine the main character's intelligence (if not his integrity). It's the scene where Moses is hauled before Pharaoh in chains, for murdering Vincent Price (you'd think he'd get a medal for that-- heh). The Pharaoh tells him he still thinks of him as his "son". All he has to do is say he's still loyal, and all will be forgiven. If he does this, when the old guy dies, MOSES will be Pharoah, and HE can free the Hebrews! But instead, he refuses, and is tossed out into the desert, hopefully to die, and with a death warrant on him if he ever comes back. I just think that makes Moses in the film look like a complete idiot... (See the animated film THE PRINCE OF EGYPT for a more authentic, and "logical" version of those events.)

Actually, my favorite line in the movie is delivered by his rival, played by Yul Brynner. His wife always loved Moses, not him-- still does. But when Moses returns and spurns her (because he's married!) she takes a personal offense to it-- "just like a woman!" As Brynner is about to lead his army to slaughter the Hebrews, she tells him, "Bring back your sword, bathed in Moses' blood!" He replies, "I shall-- to MINGLE with YOUR OWN!"

Actually, the version plotted out did not really involve the original story.

I would have begun with Heston running downm a dark street shouting, "Soylent Green is people! Soylent Green is people!"

He then runs into Chris Elliott, grabs him and shouts, "Soylent Green is people!"

Elliott grins and replies, "Soylent Green IS people!"

The camera pans back as a whole bunch of dancers come out, dancing to a festive mariachi-ish band; we see a well-lit fast-food restaurant with a corporate logo: Soylent Green.

It turns out to be a commercial for a SG fast-food chain; the camera pulls back to reveal a giel watching the commercial on TV. She turns and says, "mom? can we have Soylent Green tonight?"

And this leads into opening credits.

In short, rather than remake the old film, I'd do a total black comedy on the fast food industry, advertising, government regulation (or lack thereof), and modern society; no one is in the least bothered initially that the leading fast food company is serving humans. The "Soylent Green is people!" line would reoccur, as the company slogan.

As the company gets a series of black eyes throughout the movie, new commercials would even spin it as "human recycling," as a green practice.

What was that proposed ending?

Did you ever see "The Celluloid Closet"? Gore Vidal is talking about Ben-Hur. He says they shot the scene as if Ben-Hur and Marcellus are old lovers. They told Stephen Boyd (Marcellus) about that angle, but not Heston.

He was a good actor. Like others, I did disagree with his stance on guns, especially holding that NRA convention in Colorado so soon after Columbine.

R.I.P.

"What was that proposed ending?"

It's weird, The book on the movies went in excruitating, painful detail about the evolution of the 2nd film, and the various ideas bandied about, but the possible ending I read online was never mentioned in the book!

Simply... the "Alpha-Omega" bomb was just gonna be a standard A-bomb, not one capable of destroying all life on Earth. Taylor & Nova (Brent should never have been in the film, his whole involvement makes no sense at all) escape before the bomb goes off, and find those back at Ape City, the ones who DIDN'T want a war, ready to live in peace. It was sort of what they wound up using at the end of the 5th film (maybe the thing I liked best about that one), but without all the time-travel/history altering confusion. To ME, it would have made BENEATH... a worthy sequel, and put it in the same category as BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and ALIENS as a sequel that "finished" the story started in the first one.

But the way Heston suggested "finishing" it just made the entire story seem utterly pointless-- and the fact that they did 3 more sequels in spite of it made the end of the 2nd film a total waste.

I guess Hollywood was just obsessed with "downbeat" endings at that point...